Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

still showing, and lifted his hand in a wrap-it-up motion. “Let’s go.”

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Justice Delayed podcast

January 16, 2020

Transcript: Season 5, Episode 6

Elle voice-over:

Twenty-one.

Seven.

Three.

These are the numbers that run through my brain, every moment of every day. Turning them over, pushing them together and apart—dividing, multiplying, adding, subtracting. They repeat over and over in the Countdown Killer’s series, so much that it’s noticeable when they don’t. The 1996 TCK murders don’t fit with the pattern the way he established it in 1997, but I am confident they belong to him nonetheless. So, it must mean something that they were different. Killing does not come naturally to us, no matter what anyone might tell you. Even those who seem to have been born with the desire to end people’s lives have to learn the craft of murder. And they make mistakes—sometimes throughout their careers, sometimes just at the beginning.

It never made sense that TCK started with a twenty-year-old victim when we know his obsession with the number twenty-one. For the past two months, my producer Tina and I have been looking into every missing person and murder we could find in the area, hoping to find something we might have missed. Hoping to find the start of the countdown.

[SOUND BREAK: A phone ringing.]

Sykes:

Hello?

Elle:

Detective Sykes. You asked me to call?

Sykes:

Elle, I think you did it. I . . . I really think it’s him.

[THEME MUSIC + INTRO]

Elle voice-over:

Sometimes people ask me why I do this podcast. They accuse me of acting like I am capable of something police are not. But replacing police has never been my goal with Justice Delayed. My goal has always been to bring attention to stories that have faded into obscurity, to focus new resources and ideas on investigations that have long gone cold. A couple weeks ago, just such a case was brought to my attention by a listener. Formerly a resident of Eden Prairie, Christina Presley now lives in rural North Dakota. She kindly met me halfway, in a little roadside truck stop outside Fargo. Apologies if you hear more background noise than normal; we’ve done our best to cut it down, but it was a game day, so there will be a few cheers now and then. Skol, Vikings.

Christina is a white woman in her mid-sixties. Having spent her early adult life staying home as a mom of four, she now works part-time for the local library in her town. She is a kind-looking woman, but there are deep lines around her mouth that appear when she tells me her story. We talked for nearly two hours, and despite all that she had to say, I never once saw her cry. Grief can be like chronic pain—what is so sharp at first becomes a part of you until you forget what it was like to live without it. When the ache is constant for years, shedding tears over it feels excessive.

[SOUND BREAK: Distant referee’s whistle; a low rumble of conversation.]

Elle:

Thank you for agreeing to meet me here. Like I told you over the phone, my police contact, Detective Sykes, was able to get ahold of the case file. But before we go through that, can you please tell me about Kerry.

Christina:

Of course. Kerry was a senior in 1996, studying physics. It was the start of spring semester, just four months until graduation. All our kids made us proud, but we knew Kerry had something special. All the professors seemed to agree, and doctoral programs around the country were offering fellowships. But then . . . only a couple weeks after returning to campus, he disappeared.

Elle:

When did you find out?

Christina:

It took a few days. That was back before everyone had cell phones, you know, and Kerry would usually call us just once or twice a week. The first indication we got that anything was wrong was a call from one of his housemates. None of them had seen him, so they wanted to check if he had come to visit us. Of course, we were immediately worried. It wasn’t like him to disappear without telling us. I called his girlfriend to see if he was with her, but she said they had broken up four days before. They had been very close, and I knew Kerry was thinking about marriage, so this made me even more concerned. My husband and I thought . . . We thought maybe he had gone somewhere to blow off steam, maybe did something silly like fly to Vegas for a few days. But it still didn’t explain why he wouldn’t contact us.

Elle:

[Over the sound of cheering in the background.] When did you report him missing?

Christina:

We never filed an official report. We talked to police, of course, but they said Kerry was a low-risk victim and was probably just taking a few days to himself. Dealing with the stress of being a senior, getting dumped, you know. And then . . . then they called us a few days later to say they’d found his body.

Elle voice-over:

Kerry Presley was found half-buried in a snowdrift on the banks of the Mississippi, just a few miles from the house he rented with four guys from his university. At first, police believed it to be a suicide. There was a rope around his neck, tied to a tree behind him, and his body was slumped forward as if he had used its weight to hang himself.

Elle:

Can you go through the autopsy results for us, Martín?

Martín:

Sure. First, let me clarify something. As a medical examiner, I am asked to determine two things in the autopsy room: the cause of death and the manner of death. Essentially, what killed the person and how they died—whether it was homicide, suicide, natural causes, et cetera. Like you said, the scene was set up to make it look like Kerry had taken his own life. Preliminary MOD was suicide, but once the ME cut their case, things got more complicated.

Elle:

Just for listeners who haven’t heard that term before, when you talk